Heartbreaker in the making
That moment last week when I thought my son was dying in my arms has definitely done something to me. The dynamics of handling 2 toddlers with a wicked sense of mischief and without much in the way of a 'support' network' still gets me pressing my forehead to the cool glass of the back door and praying for mercy on a regular basis but I'm kind of a little more chilled, too.
And I feel like me and the little guy have this new bond that's like superhuman. I'm not saying we weren't bonded before, we were, but there's an element of the fact that he pretty much had to slot into the way life worked for his Big Brother and I, and so it's safe to say he's never really had much say in anything. And I suppose I just didn't have time to sit around falling in love with my second baby, because my first one was only 21 months old at the time. And there was a whole heap of other stuff going on that meant that the very fact that I was managing to keep myself and two other humans alive, no matter how small, well that seemed like a major achievement to me.
When we were holed up in the children's ward version of purgatory last week I realised it was pretty much the first time I'd ever spent extended time alone with my little 'un. I can't think of a time before when I've had so much space to just be with him, putting his needs before everything else. On the morning we got discharged he was exhausted to the point of insisting on being jiggled in an old pram we found in the playroom while he tried to doze off. Except he was kind of too tired to let go, so we played this silent game where we'd blink our eyes at each other. I don't know why I think this, maybe because it's something Dada started, but to me that blinking game means 'I love you'. So we 'I love you'd each other all morning while waiting to get sprung from jail hospital, and today he clocked me watching him in the garden and did the blinking thing and then gazed at me adoringly. I wonder if he senses something different too, if he feels the difference from the attention I was able to lavish on him for 24 hours.
Anyway before this gets any gooier, rest assured he's still the naughtiest child I've ever met, except he's so wickedly funny with it that he gets away with murder. While I imagine Big Brother's sensitive streak means he's going to get his heart broken once or twice, I imagine Baby Brother routinely going through life smashing the ladies' hearts to pieces but making them laugh while he's at it. This morning he toddled over to me, grabbed the hem of my pyjama leg between his thumb and fore-finger and, pointing at the floral pattern, announced in the most booming Ian Paisley-esque accent I've ever heard: FLOY-ERR! He's also picked up the local dialect's trademark 'ah-haa' which I can't really explain beyond saying that if you ask him a question and the answer is in the affirmative then he says 'ah-haa' instead of yes. What's funny is Big Brother used to say mm-hmm which is kind of an Anglicised version of the same thing.
And last night when the boys were drinking their bedtime milk and watching their accompanying episode of Dora, I noticed one of them had tipped up the sippy cup full of milk and left it to leak into the sofa. I told off Big Brother, who said 'It wasn't me!' so I switched my stern look to little brother. I said 'Did you spill all the milk out?' He said, of course, 'ah-haaa.' I pulled a cross face and said 'That was naughty. What do you say?' I was expecthing his apology which never fails to crack us up because it's a very earnest noise accompanied with a very serious expression except he sounds just like Pingu and kind of says 'Oor-weee' but instead of that he fixed me with a twinkly-eyed grin and said 'MORE MILK!'
